Fabio Guidetti​​Emerging writer from Italy

‘I’m interested in efficiency. I have no desire to invent stories, I just want to tell them as effectively as possible. Besides, reality is often more powerful than anything I could come up with myself.’

Fabio Guidetti (1983) is an archaeologist and ancient historian. He graduated from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy's most prestigious institution for the Humanities, under the guidance of Paul Zanker. He has been working as a researcher in Pisa, London, Berlin, and from September 2018 he will be Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. In 2016 he published The Roman empire in 100 dates, acclaimed by the press as “an indispensable synthesis to sail across the main protagonists, battles, political events, major reforms, architecture, and literary works of imperial Rome, whose influence and appeal around the world last to this day”.

‘I’m a historian, archaeologist and writer of historical non-fiction. To me that combination makes perfect sense,’ Fabio Guidetti explains. ‘The academic text is by definition a rigid medium; a researcher has to look at details, at interpretations of interpretations, and consider the reader’s basic knowledge. A literary text, on the other hand, revolves around distance: the language, the structure, the order, everything is governed by the importance of the narrative.’ Guidetti made a conscious decision to steer clear of fiction. ‘I’m interested in efficiency. I have no desire to invent stories, I just want to tell them as effectively as possible. Besides, reality is often more powerful than anything I could come up with myself.’